"I don't want a niche – I want an empire!" – Michael Wex, Globe and Mail
I’ve been lifting weights like a madman lately, trying to work off the winter’s tsholnt before bikini season hits, and so far all I’ve got is a kileh, the most-beloved Yiddish word for “hernia.” Old school Yiddish-speakers will be quick to tell you that the two afflictions that once characterized Yiddish and were apparently endemic to its speakers, are the hernia and hemorrhoids, which both enjoy a prominence in the language far out of proportion to their seriousness as diseases. (more...)
The list of what to send to camp with my daughter arrived this week. They want her to bring a lacrosse stick.
Tsaytn derlebt, as my parents used to say, “Look what we’ve lived to see”: a Jewish camp where they play lacrosse, a sport that exists only in order to realize all of my mother’s worst fears for my health. I’m from Canada and I know from lacrosse: you could poke an eye out, break an arm or leg or, God forbid, do yourself something before you even knew what hit you. (more...)
I’ve been asked to explain the term dover akher, "something else," "another thing," something that you don't want to mention. It comes from the Hebrew. Dover means "thing"; akher means "other"; the two together were used as a means of getting from one interpretation to the next in rabbinic literature, where akher on its own was sometimes used to mean "that person or thing that I prefer not to mention" or "Mr. X., whose identity we all know.” Rather than mention the name of Elisha Ben Avuya, a prominent second century scholar who turned his back on Judaism and became a pagan, the Talmud prefers to call him akher, which it also uses to mean “non-Jew.” Fundamentally, it’s calling Elisha a sheygets. (more...)
After a lecture I recently delivered about the importance of a familiarity with traditional Jewish texts and religious practices to a proper understanding of Yiddish, I was beset by a number of doubters. Noticing that one of my interlocutors had a South African accent, I asked her if she was familiar with the term khateysim. (more...)
I finished my new novel "The Frumkiss Family Business" (due for release in Canada at the end of September) a couple of weeks ago and am laying low until it's time to start editing.....
You call this a vacation? I’m so tired that I don’t even know how to describe myself. Am I oysgemutshet un oysgematert, “run down and weary, exhausted and exhausted?” Don’t ask me. Mutshet comes from Yiddish’s Slavic component, matert from the German; there is no real distinction between them because we’re all too tired to remember the difference.
Maybe, though, I look like a hon nokh tashmish, “a rooster after the hens have been trod.” Anyone who's spent any time on a chicken farm or read Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale knows that a rooster will service any number of hens in a single night, thus giving the rooster's owners a chance to sleep in the next day. (more...)
